http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/5725-usa-today-turns-to-the-content-farm-as-the-ship-sinks Print
Posted 09 April 2010 12:09pm by Patricio Robles with 2 comments
inShare.0USA Today, like the majority of dailies in the United States, has a problem. Last year, its circulation suffered a significant drop, and it's now the number two daily after being surpassed by the Wall Street Journal.
So what's USA Today to do? Obviously, it needs to change. And a small change is coming in the form of a deal the newspaper has struck with Demand Media to provide 'Travel Tips by Demand Media' on USAToday.com.
Demand Media, of course, is what is often referred to as a 'content farm'. It employs an army of freelancers to produce search engine-friendly content. Search engine-friendly content, in turn, attracts lucrative SERPs, which drive organic traffic, which drive ad revenue.
It's a model that is reportedly working quite well for Demand Media, and as I've discussed before, there's nothing inherently wrong with what the Demand Medias of the world are doing; they simply fill a particular void in the market. But, in my opinion, the fact that the second largest daily in the U.S. is turning to Demand Media for content isn't exactly an encouraging sign -- for the newspaper industry. That's because it demonstrates just how far newspapers have fallen.
One of the biggest challenges that newspapers like USA Today face is the continued commoditization of the kind of content they print. And with commoditization comes an even bigger challenge: maintaining a semblance of authority. Syndicating Demand Media's content to readers on USAToday.com simply contributes to this dynamic of commoditization and will make it harder for USA Today to credibly act as an authoritative source for travel information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_farmBecause of their recent appearance on the Web, content farms have not yet received a lot of explicit attention from the research community. The model of hiring cheap freelancers to produce content was first discussed as an alternative strategy to generating fake content automatically, together with an example of the infrastructure necessary to make it profitable through online ads, and techniques to detect social spam that promotes such content.[2]
While not explicitly motivated by content farms, there has been recent interest in the automatic categorisation of web sites according to the quality of their content. [15][16] A detailed study on the application of these methods to the identification of content farm pages is yet to be done.
